


Chambers Wharf Cold Storage

by JoJo



Category: The Professionals
Genre: Community: discoveredinalj, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pros Bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-08-18 21:57:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8177522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoJo/pseuds/JoJo
Summary: Doyle finds Bodie, and then might lose him again





	1. What Mattered

**Author's Note:**

> This constituted three fills for my Pros Bingo card - fulfilling the squares 'Chambers Wharf Cold Storage', 'Betwixt and Between' and 'Magic'

The briefest inappropriate hysteria slapped at Doyle as he stumbled over the wall at his feet. The type of hysteria which focus and adrenaline sometimes threw up at all the wrong moments. An echo of comforting fiction behind reality.

_You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!_

The Victorian brick and plaster had disintegrated. The storage facility doors, too, but everything around it as well. They could have driven a fleet of Austin Minis through the resulting hole. Behind him the bomb squad blokes were probably doing a fandango.

“Oi!” Murphy hissed, hand whacking the back of his shoulder.

The flash was gone as quick as it came. Reality bit back.

Doyle’s eyes burned from the cloud of powdered wall, still settling. It caught the back of his throat as he moved, found steadier footing on the concrete floor beyond the explosion.

There was a peculiar light. Greyish, hostile. The detonation seemed to have blown the interior lights, although the chill of refrigeration throughout the hangar was still sharp, still life-threatening.

Murphy and McCabe had peeled away on the left. Doyle led Anson into the yawning maw of the terrible beast he feared.

And he found his voice at last.

“BODIE!”

The answering silence was just as desperate.

*

What he came up on at the end of the hangar was one of those coloured stills, one of those traumatic images, that would stick forever in Doyle’s head like dead flies on fly-paper.

Bodie in the half-dark, diminished. Crumpled by violence at the foot of a blood-spattered wall. Half leaning, half lying – as if he’d been sitting, or as if he’d been trying to get up. All of a sudden what Doyle had feared all along didn’t matter. The cold, the hours of imprisonment, dousing any spark of resistance. It wasn’t going to be that, after all. What mattered was going to be the blood and the broken bones.

“Fuck,” Anson jerked out and Doyle heard him follow that up with a yell that split the silence, echoing through the vast space. “Over here!”

“Oh no you don’t,” Doyle stuttered out as he landed, knees down. His right hand froze in a cupping motion over one lacerated cheekbone. He sucked in a breath, trying to beat back the chill of his own shock and despair. “No, no, no, no you don’t.”

“Ambulance!” Anson followed up, changing his mind, voice cracked in fright. “Murphy, call an ambulance. Now!”

Yes, now, Doyle thought.

Open your eyes now.


	2. Betwixt and Between

Doyle had doubted once, what he felt.

Not quite friendship, not quite love. A halfway emotion without definition. Neither here nor there.

Being very drunk and encircled in strong arms had made him say foolish things back then.

“Bloody love you, mate.”

That one he remembered, faintly. The words had been thick with boozy comradeship, the world spinning furiously as they stumbled about outside The Red Lion, trying to keep upright.

And Bodie had clutched him tight and laughed so hard Doyle had thought he might throw up.

“Yes, and I bloody love Liverpool Football Club, sunshine,” had been the response, light as air, accompanying a fond pat to the back of his neck. “Wouldn’t want to go to bed with it though.”

Doyle had no idea either then or now why Bodie had mentioned bed. He feared he’d said something else foolish at some point on that same long and sozzled evening. Some daft proposition that had popped out in that unremembered country between inebriation and sobriety, never to be recalled.

And here Bodie was, between Here and There himself. ‘Hovering’, as the headlines often said. Between life and death. Showing every inclination, if the doctors’ increasingly coded statements were to be believed, of being a right plonker at any moment and snatching disaster from the jaws of hope.

Doyle had no doubts anymore. To be honest, he hadn’t had any for months, although he cursed himself for not saying sober what he’d garbled drunk. For not returning the favour and encircling Bodie in the strongest of strong arms.

There could be no encircling here, though. Much as he burned to, Bodie was imprisoned by a fearsome enclosure of lines and tubes instead. He looked fragile, as if any touch would tip him over. His hair was slick with fever, black against the pillows. The long, downswept lashes were damp too, as if somewhere, far away, he’d wept in fury and hopelessness.

Needing to hear foolish things.

“Mate,” Doyle said. It was the only part he could get out.


	3. Magic

There were a number of things Ray Doyle did not believe in.

Most of the God variations. Fairies both sparkly and evil. Little Green Men. Thatcher. Magic.

His mother prayed but it didn’t seem to improve Bodie’s prognosis. Beaten to within an inch of his life, knifed in the guts just to make sure. Not to mention being left to fade away in a cold storage warehouse.

“What a bloody mess,” the on-call A&E doc had said, his tone suffused with the fury of a medic who profoundly objected to human beings treating each other this way.

“Amazing, miraculous things do happen, Ray.” His sister’s soft voice down the phone line.

Doyle didn’t believe in miracles, either.

Sheer bloodymindedness, though. He did believe in that.

The day Bodie thumbed his nose at all the odds, crawled back from his virtual death sentence, and coughed up the ventilator in utter disgust... now that. That was the kind of divine sorcery Doyle decided he could get behind.

Even more of an enchantment, when he finally managed to summon the force of will to become both conscious and coherent, Bodie was entirely on the ball. He stared Doyle in the face, frowned in slow motion, and then tried to clear his throat.

“No you don’t,” Doyle said, painfully aware he’d said that before. “Don’t move, don’t speak, don’t even blink. Just... breathe.”

He’d squeezed the hand he’d held in his for hours and hours and hours. 

 

-ends-


End file.
